Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 509 posts

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#141

Post by eridius »

lmm wrote: post #127
eridius wrote: post #12

> Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level. This is a curious argument to make. The platform is too popular ? Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development? I suspect what this really means is "there are more games than ever, and the iOS App Store is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on as a discovery mechanism, thus requiring advertisin…

> This is a curious argument to make. The platform is too popular? Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development? I'll make the explicit argument: iOS games are at the decline point of the hype cycle. Irrational amounts of effort have been expended on developing iOS games, both by individual developers bamboozled by a few success stories stories and hoping to s…

> remember the great videogame crash?

No. What are you referring to? I've been playing games all my life and I have no idea what you mean by "the great videogame crash".

> Maybe, but the number of developers has kept going up.

And so have the number of users. And nearly all developers are focused on cheap / F2P games. I would wager that the proportion of high-quality/more-than-a-cup-of-coffee apps has actually gone down over time, which would suggest that competition in that market is lower than ever. If you rely on the App Store for discovery then you have a problem, but that's always been true for everyone except the most successful F2P games.

> I'm playing an F2P game at the moment for the first time in a couple of years and the depth of the content and polish is staggering, unbelievably high production values.

Let me guess, Spirit Lords? I was actually really disappointed when I realized that game was neck-deep in F2P mechanics, because it was surprisingly high-quality otherwise. And yes, there are some other F2P games that are pretty polished. But the vast majority of F2P games do not have the same quality and polish that you'd expect from a game that you had to pay more than a few dollars for.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#142

Post by Steko »

seanalltogether wrote: post #135
aresant wrote: post #31

It is fascinating how much the "micro-transaction" model on the iOS platform continues to bury everything else. Spiderweb throwing in the towel I would guess has a lot more to do with their #1 point "Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level." than the others. The top two grossing games - Clash of Clans and Game of War - receive metacritic scores of 74 and 67 respectively. Whereas the most recent Spi…

I genuinely hate how apple has pushed microtransactions as the only viable route for app/game demos on their platform. I want to try out an app or game for free, and then decide if I want to purchase the full thing or not. This is how games always worked, and this is how Steam / PS3 / Xbox work. The infrastructure apple provides however forces demos to live in the same category as microtransaction games, and as a res…

Apple hasn't pushed this. If anything they are pushing quality paid titles and trying to given them lots of visibility. The market however has spoken.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#143

Post by ryanSrich »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #104

I think that becoming the most profitable company in the world has negatively impacted Apple, at least how I view them. I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a…

Until an OS comes along that rivals OSX, I'll stick with Apple. I'm one of the few people I know that really doesn't put a whole lot of thought into hardware. Yes I need my machine to run properly but as long as there's a baseline achievement of performance I'm good.

Obviously I'd never be able to give up OSX for work purposes. Pretty much every piece of software I use is tied to OSX only.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#144

Post by jblow »

s73v3r wrote: post #110
eridius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relationships? What are you talking about? I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform. The only way I can meaningfully interpret your claim is by replacing "build relationships with them" to "and market directly to them", i.e. being able to email your customers with marketing messages. And I'm glad Apple doesn't give my email address to everyone I buy an a…

jblow: So follow them on Twitter? Go to their website? Seriously, you're acting like a developer can never see the outside world after they sign the developer agreement.

It's about how much friction is imposed on what. As anyone designing a "funnel" for web purchasing (or whatever) will tell you, a little friction goes a LONG way.

Yes, of course you can go out of your way to get connected to the people making a game. But it's just harder to do that on iOS than on Windows, and this has consequences in terms of the viability of these platforms for small developers. (It is by no means the only factor. The race-to-zero pricing on iOS is probably a bigger factor.)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#145

Post by [deleted] »

eridius wrote: post #107
[deleted] wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> to be discoverable one has to pay the advertisement dollars to be displayed in the top spots That's not how the iOS App Store works. You cannot pay Apple to be featured. The closest approximation you could do is pay one of those companies that try and game the ranking system by getting "fake" downloads (e.g. paying people to "buy" the game, etc) in order to get placed highly on the top charts, but that's not the sa…

[deleted]

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#146

Post by csomar »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #104

I think that becoming the most profitable company in the world has negatively impacted Apple, at least how I view them. I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a…

For general consumers, Microsoft is catching up. But Apple never really gained marketshare there because of its high prices.

For Professionals, (especially software developers), I don't think so. OS X is still very superior to Windows. And the apps on OS X makes it worthwhile.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#147

Post by octaveguin »

rinon wrote: post #76
[deleted] wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Supercell is in Finland, an EU country. From my understanding Supercell actually pays much higher than prevailing wages.

Software developers are generally paid quite a bit less in Finland than in the valley (e.g. 5k euros is quite high for a dev there) with a comparable cost of living. It's expensive in Helsinki and you won't find better paid developers anywhere in the world outside of the states.

Not to say the above is correct - it's no sweat shop and the few outliers like supercell and rovio cannot possibly be there because they threw a lot of labor at it. They're quality game companies that hit the market at the right time and knew their audience enough to keep them.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#148

Post by Stately »

javajosh wrote: post #115
mark_l_watson wrote: post #104

I think that becoming the most profitable company in the world has negatively impacted Apple, at least how I view them. I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a…

I've not heard of people running IntelliJ on a Surface. I'd be curious to know how well that works.

I developed on Android with IntellIJ IDEA and an awesome Surface Pro 2 for almost a year, until a move to a new job made me switch to a MacBook Air. Amazing, amazing little thing.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#149

Post by scott_karana »

schandur wrote: post #121
javajosh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not heard of people running IntelliJ on a Surface. I'd be curious to know how well that works.

I have some complaints on the Surface Pro 2, but mostly related to the TypeCover keyboard. Haven't played with SP3.

Sorry, I've gotta say: you know that things like "SP3" in Microsoft-land typically mean "Service Pack", right? It's so easy to get confused in acronym-city already, shouldn't we avoid creating more? :(

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#150

Post by Steko »

Mithaldu wrote: post #71
aresant wrote: post #31

It is fascinating how much the "micro-transaction" model on the iOS platform continues to bury everything else. Spiderweb throwing in the towel I would guess has a lot more to do with their #1 point "Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level." than the others. The top two grossing games - Clash of Clans and Game of War - receive metacritic scores of 74 and 67 respectively. Whereas the most recent Spi…

> It is fascinating how much the "micro-transaction" model on the iOS platform continues to bury everything else. It's not only iOS, it's exactly the same thing on Android. Some companies also tried it on Vita and PS3 with games like Rainbow Moon and Destiny of Spirits, but ultimately failed. Interestingly i've also been able to get people to completely drop free-to-pay games by getting them other hardware like PS Vi…

Are we pretending PC isnt a platform?
Post reply on HN